SiC (silicon carbide) is expected to be a material for next-generation semiconductor devices. SiC has excellent physical properties, having a band gap three times wider than that of Si (silicon), a breakdown field strength approximately 10 times higher than that of Si, and a heat conductivity approximately three times higher than that of Si. A semiconductor device that has low loss and is capable of high-temperature operation can be realized by taking advantage of those properties.
However, a semiconductor device using SiC has the problem of having a high contact resistance between a p-type SiC layer and a contact electrode. The contact resistance is high, supposedly because the p-type impurity activation rate in the SiC is low.